1 Mar 2016

Little Modern Farmhouse Progress and an Announcement!

I've been working hard at getting my dollhouse back together. If you remember my last dollhouse post, I had taken the whole thing apart. It's now more or less back together and I'm happy to say that I achieved my goal of creating a front-opening dollhouse. The exterior is not quite finished. It still needs trim, touch-ups and doors, but I'm happy with how far this little house has come.

The house is quite a bit smaller now which will make it more manageable to keep in our small house. For the exterior I went with white, grey and black. I replaced the windows since the plexiglass had completely yellowed and I added some new more modern mullions. I was hoping to not have any shutters on the house, but the old shutters were so well glued that they damaged the siding on the house. I ended up making new shutters that are a little more farmhouse in style and I quite like the light grey. It's the same colour that is on my office wall. I had ideas to add a standing seam detail to the roof so that it would look like a metal roof, but I kind of like it plain as well.

Just for your reference, here is what the house looked like before.

To modify the house we started by cutting back the footprint. I removed the front part under the gable that protruded out as well as the two-tier balcony across the front and side. In this picture you can see how the new back was attached and the new footprint.

This is right before the front panels and roof were attached. I changed the room layouts a little as well. I'm planning on having a kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom, a stair hall and two kids bedrooms. I'm also really happy that I was able to incorporate the original side-opening door to the house as well. There will be access from the front and one side! A little note about the Peppa Pig family in this picture: Originally my youngest said that his Peppa Pig family would live in the house, but ended up changing his mind and wanted the squirrel family to live in this house instead. :)

Now for a really fun announcement! I was asked by Cassie from Primitive and Proper to join her and a couple of other bloggers, Alice from Thoughts from Alice and Emy from Semi Gloss Design in a dollhouse challenge which we're calling "Dollhouse Therapy". We're all going to be working on completing our dollhouses over the next few months and we'll be sharing the progress on our blogs. In addition, since we have found this little dollhouse hobby so fun, we would like to challenge you to join us! You can choose to make over a whole dollhouse or just a room or two. It's completely up to you. For the month of March we'll be getting our dollhouses ready to decorate and throughout the months of April, May and June we'll challenge ourselves (and you!) to finish off a room or two. On the last Tuesday of April, May and June there will be a linky party where you can share the room you've been working on. On the final link party we will be hosting a giveaway for $100 from miniatures.com!

Here are some sneak peeks at what my fellow dollhouse friends are working on: